The E-Commerce and Tech Law Blog is a forum for practitioners and Bloomberg BNA editors to share ideas, raise issues, and network with colleagues on news, hot topics, and trends affecting e-commerce and technology law and regulations.
May 8, 2013
by Thomas O'Toole
Hockey goalies tend to receive too much credit for the wins and too much blame for the losses. I have a feeling it's going to be that way for Nicole S. Wong, the Twitter and former Google lawyer whom President Obama will reportedly soon nominate for the White House's chief privacy officer.
March 4, 2013
The Georgia Senate is considering Senate Bill 209, a curious piece of legislation that appears to mandate a disclosure on all self-help publications indicating that such publications "are not a substitute for the advice of a professional in the relevant industry." There is a lot of self-help material on the internet.
January 17, 2013
Within the community that supports domain name policymaking at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the question of whether a particular matter is "policy" or "implementation" is an important one. "Policy" at ICANN must be the product of a consensus-driven process that involves all relevant members of the ICANN community. "Implementation" matters, on the other hand, might be adopted by the ICANN board of directors without involving ICANN's various constituencies to any great extent. ICANN is currently studying the "policy vs. implementation" question, and is looking to develop guidance to help it decide which matters should be referred to the entire ICANN community for policy work and which matters are mere implementation details that can be hendled on an expedited basis.
January 14, 2013
Several key competition issues are percolating to the surface as the world transitions from the public switched telephone networks to all-IP voice and data networks, from physical storefronts to websites, from paper-based to electronic media, from broadcasting to sharing: competition among the dwindling number of internet service providers, competition among electronic content distributors, competition for scarce IP addresses and domain names, and competition among online advertising platforms. Also in this space: the persistent "digital divide" and the free speech rights internet service providers and their customers.The sixteenth and final entry in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
Lawyers who make their living at the intersection of law and technology are among the most engaged, optimistic, and passionate attorneys I've had the pleasure to meet. We received dozens of comments offering insights about where technology is taking society. Also collected here: free speech online and consumer protection. The fifteenth in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
January 11, 2013
The year 2012 saw law enforcement officials, businesses, and even candidates for political office embrace "big data" technologies. Many contributors remarked that, in 2013, "big data" will test an already creaky information privacy regime in the United States. The fourteenth in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
Most observers see Congress again picking up cybersecurity as a policy priority in 2013. If Congress doesn't act, President Obama may very well impose his own cybersecurity program. Increasing levels of identity theft and other cybercrimes may lead courts, or the Federal Trade Commission, to fashion new data security standards of care for net-connected businesses. The thirteenth in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
January 9, 2013
As Chico Escuela might have said, "Copyright lawyers been berry, berry good to me." Copyright law was again in 2012 a prolific source of cyberlaw policy issues to write about. Everyone is expecting more the same in 2013. The twelfth in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
While lawmakers in the United States continued their painstaking examination of the need for online privacy regulation, the European Commission released a proposal for Europe's second set of privacy rules, the proposed General Data Protection Regulation. It's a doozy by American standards. The eleventh in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
January 8, 2013
Information privacy is a legal issue that continues to command attention in Washington. As it has for the past 20 years. Will 2013 be any different? The tenth in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
January 7, 2013
Most folks in the internet community are passionate about keeping the government role in internet policymaking to an absolute minimum. They've held their own for the past few decades, but now that the internet has become such a great economic and social force, fending off pressure from governments to control how and where the internet works is a constant battle in the online industry. The ninth in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
The one-two punch of content-sharing social networks and always-connected, location-aware cell phones has transformed the way we communicate with each other. Expressive and artistic speech, political speech, commercial speech, speech about the workplace, even speech about cute furry animals, have all moved into the social media space. Lawmakers and law enforcers are not far behind. The eighth in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
January 4, 2013
According to trademark attorneys, the time for complaining about ICANN's new top-level domains initiative is over and the time for vigilance is at hand. The sixth in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
Employer-side attorneys hope that 2013 will be the year they get the green light to use the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act against employees who take valuable digital information with them when they depart for another employer. The seventh in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
January 3, 2013
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, after a very long, messy, seemingly ad hoc, and at-times troubled gestation period, is about to midwife a large number of new top-level internet domains. Trademark owners will have their say in the next post. Today we hear from those who, for the most part, see positive change coming to the internet. The fifth in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
Gridlock in Congress on privacy policy, a big case in Arizona testing the Federal Trade Commission's authority to create de facto national data security standards via Section 5 enforcement actions, and changes in key FTC leadership positions all suggest a busy 2013 for privacy at the agency. The fourth in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
To what extent are software patents throttling innovation in the online economy, and how will last year's policy changes in the patent system play out in 2013? The third in a series of short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
January 2, 2013
What is the outlook for privacy-related litigation in the Unites States? The second in a series collecting short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
What does the failure of the SOPA and PIPA copyright enforcement measures mean for lawmaking in this area in 2013? The first in a series collecting short takes from legal and business experts about the directions cyberlaw policy might take in 2013. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts sent us their thoughts.
This year we farmed out our annual cyberlaw predictions story to as many experts as we could identify, drawing from our subscriber lists, our advisory board, and our most-frequently consulted legal experts. Over 100 attorneys, law professors, online business executives, policy advocates and other cyberlaw experts responded, producing 307 separate assessments, predictions, or just plain complaints about any topic that fell under the general heading of cyberlaw.
November 28, 2012
U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) floated this week a draft law to prevent Congress from legislating on internet-related matters for a period of two years. Issa's unworkable, semi-serious and DOA proposal has all kinds of bad consequences, both intended and unintended.
November 15, 2012
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers shot itself in the foot today over conflict-of-interest problems high up in the organization. Twice.
October 24, 2012
Libraries in the United States are at odds with publishers over the extent to which the copyright law's first sale doctrine protects their right to lend electronic books.
October 22, 2012
I had the opportunity to participate on the What the Journalists Think panel at last week's Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers meeting in Toronto. The panel moderator didn't ask many of the questions he said he would ask. So now I have several pages of "unused" notes. Unused until now.
October 10, 2012
Maybe the South Carolina Supreme Court got it right today when it held that the 1986 Stored Communications Act does not protect opened email messages on a Yahoo! webmail account. Or maybe the court erred. Nobody knows for sure, and that's a problem.
October 5, 2012
Next week, on Oct. 9, Several leading registry operators will hold an open discussion on their proposed alternative to ICANN's trademark clearinghouse plan for the new top-level domains.
September 11, 2012
An editor on our staff, David McAuley, was fortunate to obtain an interview last week with International Telecommunication Union Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun I. Touré. The U.S. government has hammered away at Touré and the ITU all this year, accusing the international telecom body of using the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) talks in Dubai as a forum to wrest key internet governance functions away from the private sector (and the U.S. government). The accusations clearly rankled Touré, who spoke at length about what WCIT is and is not about.
September 7, 2012
The Second Circuit released today a very important opinion on the application of contract law to online contracting practices. The opinion contained a mini-treatise on contract law pertaining to online contract formation as well as an interesting discussion of the relevance of shrinkwrap license rulings to current online contracting practices.
August 9, 2012
A federal court in Michigan has ruled that the wrongful takedown of a Facebook page with 19,000 fans will not support an action for tortious interference with a business expectancy. The court reasoned that the relationship between Facebook "fans" an actual business as a result of social media interest is too tenuous to support a tort claim. Unlike!
July 27, 2012
Employer-side attorneys got a bitter pill yesterday when the Fourth Circuit held, emphatically, that it is not permissible to build a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act case against departing employees based on violations of company computer use policies. The court's opinion comes just in time for the government to add it to a possible petition for certiorari in United States v. Nosal. The petition is due at the Supreme Court on August 8.
July 23, 2012
When it comes to privacy policies, the experts say "one size doesn't fit all." For the National Hockey League, one size -- one lawful, properly written and displayed privacy policy -- would be an improvement over what I found.
June 28, 2012
Wherein I wonder if a Hungarian judo official had the misfortune of urging a very speculative interpretation of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act before a federal judge who actually had a hand in writing the statute.
June 22, 2012
ICANN's new top-level domains may produce a close approximation of a global trademark. Dave Winer, one of the founding fathers of the blogging movement, is not happy at the prospect that somebody is soon going to acquire exclusive rights to .blog and all the goodwill that goes with it.
June 20, 2012
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' plan to add thousands of new top-level domains to the internet, whether we need them or not, is a natural consequence of the government's policy to allow the free market to operate in this space. There will be excesses and rip-offs, there will be failures, there will be preposterous claims and stunning chutzpah, but it's going to be all right.
June 18, 2012
When the Maryland law to protect social network usernames and passwords was first introduced I wrote it off as typical front-running by political officials, and did not read it closely. DLA Piper's lawyers did and so, after I read their article, did I. What a mess.
May 18, 2012
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' unprecedented expansion of the Internet root creates an entirely new realm of challenges and opportunities for trademark holders.
May 16, 2012
Canadian law firm Fasken Martineau finds that few businesses in the United States appreciate the liability risks created by Canada's recently passed anti-spam legislation. That could be an expensive oversight, they say.
May 7, 2012
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, an organization that is frequently the target of complaints of self-dealing and indifference to the public welfare, is missing a huge opportunity to repair its reputation.
April 13, 2012
The Ninth Circuit ruled last week that the government couldn't premise a criminal prosecution for computer fraud based on violations of a computer use agreement. Some folks on Capitol Hill are looking to "overrule" that ruling.
April 10, 2012
An en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit speaks clearly on the interplay between computer use policies and liability under Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for unauthorized access of protected networks.
March 28, 2012
The .com top-level domain is one of only three generic domains that still have a lightweight, “thin” WHOIS database of domain registrant contact information. Yesterday’s publication of a proposed Registry Agreement for .com, which will run until 2022, means that trademark owners can scratch that agreement off the list of possible sources for WHOIS improvements.
February 28, 2012
In comments filed with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, both Microsoft and Yahoo! urged the domain name administrator to consider permitting brand owners who file purely “defensive” applications for the top-level domain corresponding to their mark to receive a refund of most of their $185,000 application fee in the event their mark is not applied for by a third-party.
The European Parliament begins its examination of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) this week. The EP's International Trade Committee is scheduled to discuss ACTA on Feb. 29, followed by an educational workshop on March 1. Both sessions will be webcast live.
February 27, 2012
The world's governments don't have to respect the consensus-driven, multi-stakeholder, private-sector-led approach to domain name administration embodied by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. They can do as they please. The example of the European Banking Authority, which recently called on ICANN to halt any efforts to create a .bank top-level domain, could be a harbinger of things to come.
Uncertainty—rather than specific aspects of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers new top-level domains initiative—appears to be fueling most brand owners' concerns about defensive registrations in the new gTLDs.
February 13, 2012
Amid widespread protests in Europe, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is injected into the upcoming French presidential election by Socialist party candidate Francois Hollande.
February 8, 2012
When the forthcoming Department of Commerce's privacy white paper and the European Commission's proposed data privacy regulation are laid side-by-side, they will reveal a gap in views on privacy as wide as the Atlantic Ocean. It will be interesting to see if common ground can be found between one party that sees privacy as a human right and another that sees privacy as a tax on information-intensive businesses.
November 3, 2011
Last week's decision by the Ninth Circuit’s decision to grant rehearing in United States v. Nosal, 642 F.3d 781 (9th Cir. 2011), is shaping up to be the best available opportunity to sharpen the definition of an important phrase in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Namely, the meaning of “exceeds authorized access,” a key CFAA term that can narrow the reach of the statute to outside hackers only or expand its reach to potentially anyone who violates a website terms of use agreement.
November 2, 2011
ICM Registry Inc., the registry operator for the .xxx top-level domain, announced Nov. 1 that it sold nearly 80,000 domain registrations in the just-concluded Sunrise A and Sunrise B registration periods.These registrations cost nearly $300 per domain, representing a massive expenditure of cash mostly by folks who want to be kept out of .xxx's adult content neighborhood.
October 3, 2011
Provisions of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that forbid internet service providers from disclosing the contents of electronic communications protect e-mail accounts belonging to foreign citizens, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held Oct. 3 in a case of first impression at the federal appellate level. The court affirmed a lower court's refusal to force Microsoft Corp. to turn over to a civil litigant e-mail messages belonging to an India-based user of Microsoft's Hotmail e-mail service.
July 29, 2011
In yesterday's ruling in Trafficschool.com Inc. v. Edriver Inc., No. 08-56518 (9th Cir., July 28, 2011), Chief Judge Alex Kozinski used the term "googler" to describe a person searching the internet via the Google search engine. He was writing about allegedly deceptive sponsored links that would "take the googler to DMV.org."
May 2, 2011
Here are some interesting articles I ran across last week, followed by my two cents. Topics: the unfortunate intrusion of the federal junk fax statute into interactive media, how the unresolved orphan works issue is muting our musical heritage, one court's belief that owners of wireless routers owe a duty of care to protect the pornography industry, and how clean brands can do business in .xxx.
By my count, there are five congressional hearings on internet law issues scheduled to take place in the next week or so -- and two more promised by Senate and House committee leaders. That's a lot of legislative attention, especially when you consider that federal legislators would rather drink the Potomac River than grapple with privacy, antitrust, and net neutrality issues.Online privacy policy has been avoided for nearly two decades. Knotty internet governance questions have been dodged and booted over to the Department of Commerce (who in turn passed it to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in 1998). Same story with net neutrality, which Congress dithered over for years until the Federal Communications Commission finally acted -- feebly and possibly unlawfully -- in 2010.
April 16, 2011
The case of A.V. v. iParadigms LLC (lower court ruling here) had a lot of cyberlaw juice when a federal district court decided it last spring. Rulings on digital fair use, electronic contracting, and computer fraud were all in there -- arising from the defendant's turnitin.com plagiarism detection service. Turnitin.com, operated by defendant iParadigms LLC, works like this: students are forced by their teachers to electronically file their written work with the turnitin.com Web site (but not before assenting to an onerous e-contract). Turnitin.com then compares the newly submitted work against its database of existing student work, delivering to its educational institution customers an assessment whether the new work is the result of plagiarism.
April 8, 2011
Double recovery -- being compensated twice for the same injury -- is discouraged in most areas of the law. Not so apparently when it comes to statutory damages for copyright infringement, as Judge Kimba Wood ruled April 6 in Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC, No. 06-5936 (S.D.N.Y., April 6, 2011), a case in which the court has already found LimeWire liable for inducing many copyright infringements committed by its users.
March 31, 2011
The World Intellectual Property Organization is out this morning with its annual statistics on the number if cybersquatting cases handled by its Arbitration and Mediation Center. WIPO says that its domain name arbitration business was up 28 percent in 2010. According to WIPO, trademark owners filed 2,696 cases (covering 4,370 domains) under the ICANN Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy last year.
As far as I know, no reported case has yet extended the protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to Facebook. This case might be the first.I can't think of any reason why Facebook wouldn't be entitled to immunity for allegedly unlawful content on one of its subscriber's pages. Interactive computer service. Third-party content. Non-IP claim. Unfortunately, the complaint is not yet on the plaintiff's website.
March 7, 2011
Santa Clara Law School's High Tech Law Institute held an event March 4 to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the enactment of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the landmark cyberlaw that gives internet publishers the freedom to police their networks and to publish the views of users without fear of creating legal liability. Mostly, CDA Section 230 insulates online companies from liability for publishing libelous material written by others, though it has been put to many other defensive uses during the last 15 years.
November 30, 2010
A few weeks back I wrote about a magistrate judge's ruling that a woman who sued Universal Music Corp. for filing an allegedly fraudulent DMCA takedown notice had waived her attorney client privilege by blogging and e-chatting and talking to news media about the case -- particularly about discussions she had with her counsel, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
November 12, 2010
In addition to copyright infringement, trademark infringement, loss of employment, loss of prospects for employment, loss of friends, loss of privacy, cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking, defamation, juror misconduct, home robbery while you're out of town, and plain old creating evidence that can later be used against you in court, we can now add waiver of attorney-client privilege to the list of bad things that can happen through ill-advised use of social media.
November 3, 2010
The federal election of 2010 will bring the same sort of change in technology policy that followed the elections of 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008. Not much. Nobody gets elected or loses their seat on the burning tech policy issues of today. The electorate doesn't seem to care about net neutrality or online privacy or software patents or copyright trolls and digital fair use. Over at the Precursor Blog, Scott Cleland, a rabid Google foe who also believes in the unicorn of a competitive telecom market, has uncovered one nugget of truth: no candidate who signed a net neutrality pledge won election last night. Most of those candidates looked like small potatoes to me, so it's far from clear that net neutrality had the impact on the election that Cleland ascribes to it. Still, it's undoubtedly true that there is no juice at all in net neutrality as a political issue. No incumbent legislator signed the pledge.
October 5, 2010
The U.S. Supreme Court's landmark privacy cases, cases like Roe v. Wade that found in the Due Process Clause a right to reproductive freedom, or Cruzan v. Missouri Dept. of Health that found a constitutionally protected liberty interest in making end-of-life decisions, have conditioned people to believe that the wise men and women on the U.S. Supreme Court will save us from the worst excesses of government and our fellow citizens.
September 23, 2010
It looks like Google won one, and lost one, in European courts today. Over at its European Public Policy Blog today, Google is publicizing a Spanish court's decision to dismiss copyright infringement claims brought by a television broadcaster against the YouTube video-sharing website. According to Google's account of the ruling, the court ruled that it was the copyright owner's responsibility to police for infringements and then to identify infringing material on the site; notification would create a legal duty for YouTube to take down the infringing materials.
September 17, 2010
Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia issued an interesting opinion earlier this week in a case involving one company's multiple acts of datamining a competitor's website with a screen-scraping program. Among other things, the court held that the plaintiff had failed to allege a valid breach of contract claim, a claim based on data use restrictions in a browsewrap presentation. The court said that the plaintiff's unadorned allegations that "the terms of the TOUs [Terms of Use] are readily available for review" and that the defendants had an "opportunity to review" the terms fell short of the pleading standards set out in a pair of recent Supreme Court decisions.
September 2, 2010
It seemed like only a matter of time before craigslist would prevail in a related action it initiated in South Carolina. By "related," I mean that the South Carolina litigation arose from the same substantially similar set of operative facts as the Illinois case. Just as in Dart, a public official (South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster) claimed that craigslist was criminally liable for online prostitution ads appearing on the site. McMaster, who at the time was running for the Republican nomination for governor, had engaged in a lot of public saber-rattling -- threatening on several occasions to shut down craigslist unless the site banished prostitution solicitation from its South Carolina listings. On one occasion, McMaster told a television reporter that he was "preparing for a prosecution" and that the "#1 defendant is Mr. Jim Buckmaster, who is the man in charge of craigslist ... craigslist is a big promoter and facilitator of prostitution."
August 3, 2010
I'm sitting here staring at materials for the American Bar Association's Annual Meeting later this week in San Francisco. I don't remember a time when there were more internet-related programs on the schedule. The top of mind issue this year appears to be social media, a technological phenomenon that has seeped into just about every corner of the law.
July 8, 2010
The Ninth Circuit today released a cranky but important decision on the application of the trademark law's nominative fair use doctrine as it applies to the selection of an internet domain name that contains a trademarked term. The case involved Toyota's trademark infringement claims against a pair of auto brokers that operated at the buy-a-lexus.com and buyorleaselexus.com domain names. The lower court enjoined the auto brokers' use of the Lexus marks in the domains, but the Ninth Circuit said, in effect, not so fast.
June 23, 2010
Yesterday the Utah Supreme Court ruled that electronic signatures -- submitted through a website -- are valid signatures under the state's election code. The court's ruling creates a Pandora's box of election law issues for state officials who had -- until yesterday -- not given any serious thought to the prospect that candidates for political office in Utah have a right to use electronic media to collect and submit nominations for political office.
June 21, 2010
Another anti-spam litigant took one on the chin today. The California Supreme Court ruled in Kleffman v. Vonage Holdings Corp., No. S169195 (Cal. June 21, 2010), that an e-mail marketer's act of sending commercial e-mail messages from multiple, random and nonsensically named domain names is not unlawful under California's anti-spam statute, Cal. Business and Professions Code 17929.5. Even if the sender's purpose is to evade spam filters.
June 17, 2010
Nobody, it seems, not Congress, not even the U.S. Supreme Court wants to make a definitive statement about the privacy rights online. The high court said today that the time is not yet right to make a constitutional ruling about electronic privacy. Given the rapid pace of change in information technology and the relatively little attention online privacy issues have been given by Congress, state legislatures, and lower courts, it would not be prudent for the court to attempt to prematurely decide--and thereby conclusively establish as a matter of constitutional law--which kinds of online privacy expectations society is prepared to protect against intrusion.
May 19, 2010
Don't tell my boss, but I just spent the last 30 minutes reading about social security numbers. It was fascinating.Do you know that the Social Security Administration has issued over 420 million different social security numbers?Do you know that by using the SSA's nine-digit format (XXX-XX-XXXX), it is mathematically possible to create over one billion different social security numbers? However, because the SSA has administratively decided that some combinations will not be made available, the actual number of possible social security numbers is 980 million.
May 12, 2010
From DarkReading.com, a story about a federal lawsuit against Goldman Sachs and several unknown Goldman Sachs employees who allegedly logged into, and stole thousands of records from, the plaintiff's database of investor contact information. The database was protected by a restrictive license and by passwords.The lawsuit has several aspects that make it worth watching. First, the plaintiffs claim that Goldman Sachs should be liable for its employees' violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Few cases discuss the circumstances under which an employer can be held liable for an employee's CFAA violations. Cases like Butera & Andrews v. IBM Inc., No. 1:06-CV-647 (D.D.C. Oct. 18, 2006), create a high hurdle for plaintiffs, stating that intentional conduct on the part of the company must be proven to create CFAA liability.
April 29, 2010
A shred of victory for online privacy in the Second Circuit's otherwise adverse opinion today in Arista Records LLC v. Doe 3, No. 09-905 (2d Cir., April 29, 2010). The case was about how specific a copyright owner's complaint must be in order to overcome an unknown file-sharer's First Amendment right to anonymity. For my lawyer readers, this case is about the meaning of Twombly/Iqbal for copyright infringement complaints.
April 28, 2010
I try not to lard this blog with too much personal opinion but after reading the thousandth news article about Sen. Charles Schumer's rousing call for the Federal Trade Commission to write guidlines on privacy in social networks, I have to say, in the words of my boyhood hero John McEnroe, "You cannot be serious." Schumer is asking the FTC to do his job for him. Surely Schumer -- who has been in Congress since 1991 and in the Senate since 1999 -- knows that the FTC's authority to regulate online privacy is on very shaky and politically charged ground. At a minimum, he knows that Congress has failed to act, despite calls for federal online privacy legislation for over a decade.
April 27, 2010
State legislation offers a good window into how people are feeling about technology. Whereas Congress' agenda tends to reflect the business community's needs, state legislation tends to be much more for the people, by the people, if you know what I mean. Just this morning, sifting through a few state-law proposals, I learned that (1) folks are deeply unsettled by Google Street View and file-sharing software, (2) somebody in Louisiana doesn't think it's fair for businesses that purchase software to have to compete with businesses that don't, and (3) it's OK to surreptitiously slip a RFID chip in a bottle of wine but not in a human body.
Cyberlaw Predictions: Competition, Trademarks, Online Contracts
Georgia Bill Would Regulate Online Self-Help Publishers
Cyberlaw Predictions: Technology and Society, Free Speech, Consumer Protection
Cyberlaw Predictions: Data Security, Cloud Computing, and Identity Management
Race Toward New gTLDs Finish Line Sparks Debate on ICANN's Policy Methods